IACHR 192nd-session regional hearing on artificial intelligence and human rights (7 March 2025)

On the morning of Friday 7 March 2025, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR / CIDH) convened the fifth regional thematic hearing in its standing series on artificial intelligence and human rights — held virtually on Zoom with simultaneous Spanish-English-Portuguese interpretation, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Washington DC time, and broadcast live across the Commission's social channels. The hearing sat inside the 192nd Period of Sessions and is recorded on the Commission's own register as Hearing 3807. The substantive intervention was anchored on a joint technical contribution drafted by Derechos Digitales and signed by seventeen Latin American civil-society organisations, and on twelve named registered participating organisations who took the speaking time across the 90-minute window. The hearing's procedural outcome — a standing Commission request that civil society submit multistakeholder recommendations on artificial intelligence and human rights — converted the 90-minute session into a sustained Inter-American process that the coalition's subsequent advocacy continues to feed.

The convening

The IACHR's regional thematic-hearing mechanism is the standing Inter-American vehicle through which the Commission's commissioners and rapporteurs receive coordinated regional positions on substantive human-rights questions from civil society. Each Period of Sessions packages a slate of thematic hearings — applied for in advance by civil-society organisations, granted on the Commission's discretion, and held within the session calendar — and 7 March 2025 was the AI-and-human-rights hearing slot of the 192nd Period of Sessions. The Commission identified the hearing on its own social-media announcement as the fifth in the series of regional thematic hearings on artificial intelligence and human rights — one of the longest-running regional-human-rights-system AI-and-human-rights tracks in the world, predated globally only by the parallel European AI Act civil-society engagement track and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights' standing AI files.

The session's virtual Zoom-with-interpretation format — rather than the in-person Washington DC format the Commission uses for some sessions — both reflected the Commission's post-pandemic operating mode and lowered the entry cost for the multi-country Latin American civil-society coalition to participate from Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Mexico City, Asunción, Santiago, Bogotá, and other regional capitals at once. The simultaneous Spanish-English-Portuguese interpretation made the hearing's substantive register accessible across the coalition's working languages and onto the international observer record. The live broadcast on the Commission's social channels — alongside the formal Zoom-with-interpretation regime — converted the closed institutional venue into a public-facing record civil-society organisations and journalists in the region could access in real time.

Commissioners and rapporteurs

The hearing was presided over by Commissioner Stuardo Ralón (chair of the hearing), Commissioner Carlos Bernal, and Commissioner Gloria de Mees, alongside Pedro Vaca, Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (RELE). Ralón's chairing role and Bernal and de Mees's commissioner participation positioned the hearing inside the Commission's collegial commissioner-and-rapporteur architecture, and Vaca's involvement made the hearing structurally adjacent to the Special Rapporteur's parallel UN-RELE Joint Communiqué track on AI and freedom of expression — the institutional bridging mechanism through which the substantive register travelled from the Inter-American system onto the wider international human-rights record within weeks of the hearing.

Participating organisations

The twelve civil-society organisations registered to speak across the hearing's 90-minute window — recorded by Fundación Vía Libre — were Article 19 Mexico and Central America Office, the Human Rights Centre at the Faculty of Law of the Universidad de Chile, the Centro de Estudios en Derecho, Tecnología y Sociedad (CEDETyS), the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS, Argentina), Democracia en Red (Argentina), Derechos Digitales (the coalition's coordinator), Fundación Vía Libre (Argentina), the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ICNL), the Observatorio de Derecho Informático Argentino (ODIA), the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS, Brazil), the Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (R3D, Mexico), and the Red Feminista de Investigación en Inteligencia Artificial Nodo Latinoamérica (the F<A+I>r Latin American Hub). TEDIC (Paraguay) registered as an observer and supplied the EmpleaPY case-study evidence anchoring the Paraguayan portion of the substantive submission. The seventeen-organisation roster of the joint technical contribution extended beyond the registered speakers into a wider coalition of co-signatory organisations whose names appear on the submitted PDF but who were not allotted speaking time at the hearing itself.

The coalition shape — a regional drafting coordinator (Derechos Digitales) running the substantive editing across a multi-country roster of national civil-society organisations, an academic legal centre, and a feminist-AI thematic network, drawing on the Al Sur consortium's pre-existing AI working group infrastructure and the F<A+I>r Latin American Hub's feminist-AI track — is the working Latin American digital-rights field's coalition template for Inter-American advocacy. Several of the registered speakers are Al Sur consortium members (Derechos Digitales, R3D, TEDIC as observer; Coding Rights, in corpus, anchors the consortium's Brazilian feminist-decolonial track but did not appear on the registered-speaker roster at this hearing).

The substantive register

The coalition's substantive intervention organised around three connected threads. The data-colonialism and Global North–Global South asymmetry frame — the substantive register anchoring the joint contribution on the asymmetry between the Global North-headquartered AI industry and the Global South publics most affected by AI deployment, and the absence of regional protective frameworks and democratic accountability mechanisms — supplied the working Latin American epistemic position the coalition wanted on the Inter-American record. The frame is the substantive register Latin American civil society has developed across a decade of work in the Al Sur consortium, the LAVITS (Latin American Network of Surveillance, Technology and Society) convening circuit, and Coding Rights's feminist-decolonial public communications.

Grounded empirical evidence on state-AI deployments across the region anchored the substantive demand. The joint technical contribution PDF and the published intervention summaries name the substantive cases the coalition put on the public record: the Paraguayan Ministry of Labour's EmpleaPY Inter-American Development Bank-funded employment-platform deployment (TEDIC's investigation, in a country lacking specific data-protection legislation); the Mexican deployment of facial-recognition technologies in public space (R3D's principal case and the substantive ground of R3D's intervention demanding the prohibition of AI in video surveillance); the Argentine predictive-policing and protest-identification cases (Fundación Vía Libre's intervention on the use of surveillance technologies based on predictive algorithms by state actors and the resulting criminalisation of dissent); and parallel cases anchored in Derechos Digitales's comparative regional research (in corpus) on automated decision-making in social interventions in Chile, justice administration in Colombia, job allocation in Brazil, and public-health management in Uruguay. Derechos Digitales' broader Inteligencia artificial, derechos humanos y justicia social (the GIRAI 2024 Latin American chapter, published in March 2025 in time for the hearing) was distributed to commissioners as part of the coalition's intervention package and supplied the regional evidence-base across the named cases.

The third thread is the substantive recommendation track to the Inter-American human-rights system. The joint contribution argues that ethical guidelines on AI, while necessary, are insufficient on their own; that state obligations under inter-American standards require regulatory frameworks anchored in human rights at all stages of AI development and deployment; that algorithmic opacity and discriminatory biases against vulnerable populations are incompatible with the rights to equality and non-discrimination the inter-American system protects; that meaningful participation, transparency, and accountability mechanisms are preconditions for any human-rights-compatible AI deployment; and that human-rights impact assessments must be conducted before AI is deployed in public services, with the assessment evidence made public and contestable. The recommendation framing was calibrated to the Inter-American system's own working vocabulary on state obligations and is the register the Commission's subsequent multistakeholder-recommendations track has continued to draw on.

The Commission's procedural response

The Commission's procedural response — named in the hearing's closing remarks and recorded on TEDIC's coalition account — was a standing request that civil society submit multistakeholder recommendations on artificial intelligence and human rights. The request is itself politically meaningful in the Inter-American civil-society register: regional thematic hearings under the IACHR's 192nd Period of Sessions are politically expensive — they require sustained multi-country coalition mobilisation across a region with no shared legislature, formal procedural compliance with the Commission's hearing-application regime, and continuous coordination across organisations operating in Spanish, Portuguese, and English — and the substantive demands they package are in practice rarely answered by the Commission with a sustained follow-up track. The standing multistakeholder-recommendations request converted the campaign's investment in the hearing into a continuing Inter-American process the coalition's subsequent advocacy continues to feed.

The most legible follow-up artefact on the public record within weeks of the hearing was the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression's joint communiqué with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression on artificial intelligence and freedom of expression (OAS Press Release 089/2025). The joint communiqué — issued by RELE Rapporteur Pedro Vaca and his UN counterpart — recognises the substantive concerns the coalition's contribution had named, frames the design, development, and deployment of AI as work that must be firmly anchored in international human-rights law and in national legislation aligned with it, and supplies the bridging artefact through which the Inter-American AI-and-human-rights register travels onto the UN Human Rights Council record.

Significance

The 7 March 2025 hearing is the corpus's first Event anchored in the Inter-American human-rights system and the first Latin American civil-society convening on artificial intelligence specifically — closing two corpus event-anchor gaps at once. Until this entry the corpus's Event slice ran heavily on UK, US, multi-region, MENA, and African convenings (Bread & Net 2024, the #KeepItOn coalition launch, the Stop Killer Robots London launch, the Belén Communiqué on autonomous weapons hosted in Costa Rica but state-coalition humanitarian-disarmament rather than Latin American civil-society advocacy), with no Inter-American or Latin American civil-society advocacy event of any kind. The hearing also gives the corpus its first event anchored on a regional human-rights body's thematic-hearing mechanism (procedurally distinct from the UN First Committee resolution events, the strategic-litigation court-filing events, and the coalition-launch events the corpus already covers), its first event in the Inter-American institutional venue, and its first event whose primary working languages on the public record were Spanish and Portuguese.

Within the campaign's own arc the hearing is the central convening event — the procedural moment at which the seventeen-organisation joint contribution moved from a documentary artefact submitted to the Commission into the formal record of the Inter-American human-rights system, through twelve registered speaking interventions across the 90-minute window and one observer participation. The campaign's substantive register — the data-colonialism frame (msg-data-colonialism queued in the messages slice records its working public life), the EmpleaPY / facial-recognition / predictive-policing / Sistema Alerta Niñez evidence-base, and the recommendation track to the Inter-American system on state obligations — entered the Commission's record at this hearing and has continued to feed the Commission's standing multistakeholder-recommendations process since.

The hearing's procedural model — a regional civil-society coalition contribution to a regional human-rights body, paired with the regional Special Rapporteur's parallel coordination with the UN Special Rapporteur on the same substantive question — is the working architecture the field uses on AI-and-human-rights advocacy across regional human-rights systems globally, and the corpus's Inter-American instance is its principal Latin American case. The hearing's broader civil-society field is anchored on Derechos Digitales, Coding Rights, pub-decisiones-automatizadas-america-latina, and voice-jamila-venturini within the corpus, with the wider seventeen-organisation roster (Article 19 Mexico and Central America Office, CELS, Vía Libre, R3D, TEDIC, ODIA, ICNL, the Universidad de Chile Human Rights Centre, CEDETyS, Democracia en Red, PUCRS, the F<A+I>r Latin American Hub, and others) sitting outside the corpus's current entity coverage but identifiable on the named registered-speaker record above.